Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have successfully created a sophisticated, yet affordable, method to turn ordinary glass into a high-tech solar concentrator. The technology, called a luminescent solar concentrator (LSC), uses dye-coated glass to collect and channel photons otherwise lost from a solar panel’s surface. It could eventually enable an office building to draw energy from its tinted windows as well as its roof. Lead researcher Marc Baldo and colleagues announced their findings in the July 11 issue of Science. The researchers coated glass panels with layers of two or more light-capturing dyes. The dyes absorb incoming light and then re-emit the energy into the glass, which serves as a “waveguide” to channel the light to solar cells along the panels’ edges. Because the edges of the glass panels are so thin, far less semiconductor material is needed to collect the light energy and convert it into electricity. “Solar cells generate at least ten times more power when attached to the concentrator,” noted Baldo. As a result, rather than covering a roof with expensive solar cells, the cells only need to be around the edges of a flat glass panel. Because the starting materials are affordable, relatively easy to scale up beyond a laboratory setting, and easy to retrofit to existing solar panels, the researchers believe the technology could find its way to the marketplace within three years. Three of Baldo’s co-researchers are starting a company, Covalent Solar, to develop and commercialize the new technology. Go to: MIT and The Economist

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